Trying to capture that sweet spot in a new way

Obligatory opening apology for the long silence and lack of communication. It’s been a stressful couple of months here as the family moves to our new place and various personal challenges are overcome (or are still being fought).

I’d like to specifically call out Kaprou’s amazing work over at Fictive Fantasy in expanding on the game and offering so much amazing work in the Old School Hack vein, so much so that I’ve given him a permanent spot over in the sidebar here.

Recently Old School Hack was mentioned in an RPG.net thread about design & layout, and some criticized it for being too busy.

I think this is fair, actually. Old School Hack’s origins are very much from play-aids, character sheets and quick-reference printouts you can throw down individually to help facilitate play. Its current form doesn’t really read as a book that well because a certain degree of single-page cohesiveness and page individualizing as a goal.

This may be why the game’s layout speaks to some and not to others, I don’t know. I’ve always been upfront about Old School Hack’s nature as an experiment in RPG presentation, and I’m interested in continuing and refining that experiment. The fact that I’m professionally involved in typography and layout design was actually challenging for me to get over – I had to give myself permission to consider it an exploratory, amateurish project.

It’s been over a year now and this has become the highest priority to finalizing the Basic Game, in order to establish a strong precedent for compiling the next Heroic Game tier. I’d like Old School Hack to look more like a book. Of course I’ll keep around the Beta version of the game for Legacy reasons for anyone that prefers it.

As I finally start to get some free time over the holidays and climb back onto the designing horse, my first hopes are to redesign the Old School Hack character sheet from the ground up with Campaign play in mind. I’ll try to drop some teasers as I do so, so stay tuned.

Have a happy set of Holidays, everyone! As gamers, we have much to be joyful for.

I have been playing OSH. I find the 1 page tells it all nature of OSH’s design appealing … I think it’s awesome. But, as I use the game I can see an argument for a more traditional book-like appearance. This actually surprises me. But, I am glad it’s something you are looking into.

What do you think?

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